Everything below was checked against the Path of Exile Wiki before publishing. The wiki's Mercenary page currently carries an official "needs to be updated — Rework in version 3.29.0" banner, so where it is silent on a 3.29-only detail this guide says so instead of pretending otherwise.
## Path of Exile mercenaries explained: what you are actually fighting Mercenaries are unique enemies from the lawless cities of Trarthus. They are not monsters you kill on sight — you wager Gold to challenge one to a duel. Win and the wagered Gold is refunded, you take a reward, and the mercenary fights alongside you as an ally for the rest of the area. Lose and the mercenary teleports out and your Gold is gone. Each one carries a **Rucksack** that holds up to four rewards, typically currency or scarabs, plus a full set of equipment that is usually moderately-to-well crafted and can include unique items. That Rucksack is the entire point of the mercenary rushing strategy.  The video calls the reward pouch a "rock sack" — the auto-captions mangle it. The wiki and the in-game tooltip both call it a **Rucksack**, and it holds a maximum of four items. ## How to recruit mercenaries in PoE: campaign, maps and permanent hires This is the part the video skips entirely, so it comes straight from the wiki. Mercenaries start appearing from **Act 3 onwards**. You are guaranteed to find one in **The Sceptre of God**, **The Grand Arena**, **The Ridge** and **The Hidden Underbelly**, and since patch 3.29.1 a mercenary always spawns in **The Control Blocks in Act 10** regardless of how over-levelled you are. Only one mercenary can spawn in a given area, and in the campaign you must be no more than 10 levels above the area level for them to appear at all. Important caveat for anyone hoping to fund their league start during the campaign: **mercenaries found in those guaranteed campaign areas carry no Rucksack items**. They are there to give you a temporary ally and a Trarthan gem, not currency. Opening the mercenary interface gives you two choices: | Option | What you get | Where it works | |---|---|---| | **Take Item** | One selected equipped item, or everything in the Rucksack. On defeating them they also join you as a temporary ally. | Campaign and maps | | **Rematch** | A **Mercenary Warrant** — an itemised version of that mercenary you can slot alongside a map to summon them again with the same skills but new items. Tradeable. | Maps only | A mercenary will only grant their Warrant once, so you cannot farm the same one forever. Hired mercenaries scale their passive stats and skills to the level of the area you are in, up to a maximum of level 68, and during the campaign a temporary hire lasts up to three areas. If you want to **hire a mercenary permanently** in Path of Exile, that requires the new **Luminary** ascendancy for the Scion, added in 3.29.0. A Luminary can keep up to three permanently hired mercenaries — two in reserve in town or hideout, one active in combat — and unlike temporary hires you can change their equipment freely. ## PoE infamous mercenary: what Infamy actually changes An Infamous Mercenary is marked by a decorated border around their name and an "Infamous" prefix on their class. Compared to a normal mercenary they have a greater chance of extra supports on their skills, better-rolled gear, a chance at an exclusive **Infamous modifier**, a **guaranteed** unique item equipped, and — the reason you care — **better items in their Rucksack**.  There are three separate levers on mercenary infamy, and the video only uses one of them: * **The scarab.** A Trarthan Scarab of Infamy makes every mercenary in the area Infamous outright. * **Map tier.** Patch 3.29.1 made Infamous Mercenaries **50% more common in tier 1 maps, scaling to roughly twice as common in tier 16 maps**. The video says tier 16 "should get you better loot on average" — the wiki gives the actual reason and the actual number. * **Map modifiers.** The wiki states plainly that the chance of encountering an Infamous Mercenary **increases based on the number of map modifiers**. The video never mentions this, and it matters, because the strategy as demonstrated runs unrolled white maps. If you are not using the scarab, rolling your maps is a free infamy multiplier. ## The four Trarthan scarabs, and which one is the farm  | Scarab | Effect | |---|---| | **Trarthan Scarab** | Area is inhabited by a Mercenary | | **Trarthan Scarab of Infamy** | Mercenaries found in Area are Infamous; Mercenaries found in Area are accompanied by two Wild Mercenaries | | **Trarthan Scarab of Renown** | All Equipment Items on Mercenaries found in Area are Unique | | **Trarthan Scarab of Surprising Alliances** | Wild Rogue Exiles in Area have 50% chance to be accompanied by a Wild Mercenary; Wild Mercenaries have increased Difficulty for each Wild Mercenary in Area | All four have Limit: 1, so you can run one of each in the same map. The auto-captions render the family name as "Trove Scarab" and "Churf and Scarb" — the in-game tooltip above confirms it is **Trarthan**. The Scarab of Infamy is the whole strategy. It cost 1–2 chaos for the first two days of the league, briefly spiked to about 4 chaos, and settled back around 2. The video's own hedge — "it turns the main merc, and maybe the other two, I'm not sure" — is answered by the tooltip and the wiki: the modifier reads *Mercenaries found in Area are Infamous*, plural, so it applies to the Wild Mercenaries too. ## Mercenary rushing: the actual loop  The loop is deliberately stupid. Enter, find the mercenary, beat them, take the Rucksack, leave. You never clear the map, you never care about the rest of the layout, and the map item is consumed either way. The video runs this on **Mesa**. The wiki confirms Mesa Map is a **tier 3** map in the **southwest** quadrant of the current Curse of the [Allflame](/guides/poe-3-29-abyss-farming-propagation-allflame-ground-loot) map series, with **Oak the Mighty** as its boss — a small, fast layout with a single easy boss, which is exactly what you want. ## Wild mercenaries: the trap that eats most of your loot The Scarab of Infamy spawns two Wild Mercenaries next to the main one. You cannot choose their loot, but killing them drops items anyway — sometimes a full Rucksack, sometimes a random unique ring, most often very little. The catch: **if you kill the main mercenary first, the Wild Mercenaries become untargetable NPCs** and you get nothing from them. They have no map icon, and the main mercenary is the one actively attacking you, so in practice you kill the wrong one most of the time. The video's author reports failing to kill them roughly 80% of the time. The one workaround demonstrated is damage over time: apply a DoT to the Wild Mercenaries before the main one dies and they can still die and drop loot after becoming untargetable, as long as the DoT would have killed them.The wiki does not document Wild Mercenary targeting behaviour or the damage-over-time workaround at all — its Mercenary page is flagged as not yet updated for the 3.29.0 rework. Both points are reported from the video only and should be treated as unverified.
## The Atlas passive tree for mercenary rushing  Mercenaries need almost no atlas investment, which is why this works so early. These are the nodes the wiki lists, with their exact wording: | Atlas passive | What it does | |---|---| | **Loot and Pillage** | Mercenaries found in your Maps always have full Rucksacks; 10% chance on defeating them for them to drop all their Items | | **Mercenary Additional Item Dropped** | On defeating Mercenaries found in your Maps they drop 1 of their untaken Items (two points available) | | **Mercenary Unique Item Chance** | 15% increased chance for Items worn by Mercenaries found in Maps to be Unique (three points available) | | **Infamous Mercenary Chance** | 10% increased chance for Mercenaries found in your Maps to be Infamous (four points available) | | **Mercenary Chance** | Your Maps have +10% chance to be inhabited by a Mercenary; Scarabs dropped have 10% increased chance to be Trarthan Scarabs | | **Minor Fiefdoms** | Your Maps have +30% chance to be inhabited by a Mercenary; +30% increased chance for dropped Scarabs to be Trarthan | | **High Stakes** | Mercenary Wagers require 100% increased Gold; Wagers return 30% increased Gold if you win | **Loot and Pillage** is the node the video points at when it says the Rucksack "will always be full". The wiki shows it does a second thing the video never mentions: a flat 10% chance for the mercenary to drop *everything*. The "two atlas passives that make mercs drop two pieces of gear each" is **Mercenary Additional Item Dropped**, which grants one untaken item per point and has two points available — so two points, two items. The wiki's wording is "1 of their untaken Items", i.e. equipment you did not select, not a guaranteed second Rucksack. Beyond the mercenary nodes the rest of the tree is spent on **Eater of Worlds altars** (the blue ones) for the scarab-duplication upside, on Synthesised Stability, and on nodes that add extra scarabs from bosses. The auto-captions render Eater of Worlds as "eternal world" and Synthesised Stability as "emphasize stability". ## Layering the Templar Astrolabe and Domination Scarab of Terrors  This is the high-investment layer, and it is where the video is easiest to misread. A **Templar Astrolabe** creates a Shaped Region covering 6–9 adjacent maps in one Atlas quadrant. Every map in a Shaped Region gets *Slay the Map Boss to successfully complete Maps within this Shaped Region* and *Map Bosses have increased Difficulty and Reward for each completed Map*, plus a rolling pool of extra modifiers. The one you are hunting is **Final Boss drops (2–3) additional Scarab Items** — the video's "map boss drops two to three additional scarabs", confirmed word for word.Wiki correction: the video summarises the strategy as "run Mesa in the bottom left quadrant with a Templar Astrolabe applied". The wiki is explicit that maps within Shaped Regions require at least a Tier 16 map to enter — inserting anything lower returns "Map item is too low level to experience the Shaped Region's effects". Mesa is a tier 3 map. The cheap Mesa rush and the Astrolabe layer are therefore two separate stages, not one setup: rush cheap maps until you can sustain tier 16, and only then run the Shaped Region on top.
The multiplier comes from **Domination Scarab of Terrors**, whose tooltip reads *Shrines in Area are guarded by an Atlas Boss* and, critically, *Modifiers to the Final Map Boss also apply to these Atlas Bosses*. That second line is why stacking all four Domination scarabs with Domination nodes on the tree turns "the final boss drops 2–3 extra scarabs" into every shrine guardian in the map dropping them.  Those boss-dropped scarabs are not affected by atlas-tree scarab quantity nodes, but they **are** affected by the Eater of Worlds altar upside *Scarabs dropped by slain Enemies have (15–30)% chance to be Duplicated* — which is why you take the blue altar when it offers it.Second wiki correction: the video says Synthesised Stability makes sure the Astrolabe map "doesn't disappear". The wiki is more careful — with Synthesised Stability allocated, a map other than the selected map collapses instead, but the selected map can still collapse if a later collapse leaves it on the smaller disconnected side. It reduces the risk; it does not remove it.
Death Rush is confirmed on the wiki as a unique Amethyst Ring: +(17–23)% to Chaos Resistance, Recover (3–5)% of Life on Kill, Gain Adrenaline for (1–3) seconds on Kill. Three of the spreadsheet's item labels — rendered by the captions as "pandemonium", "risk" and "catalysing" — are the author's own shorthand and do not map cleanly onto any scarab name on the wiki, so they are left unidentified here rather than guessed at.
This is one player's sample of 100 maps on a specific build in the first days of the league. Scarab prices moved between 1 and 4 chaos over that window, so the 400 chaos cost line is not a stable number.
## Farming uniques instead: the Renown variant The other mercenary strategy people are running stacks **Trarthan Scarab of Infamy** with **Trarthan Scarab of Renown**, so every equipment item on every mercenary in the area is unique. The video confirms by testing that Wild Mercenaries do inherit the Renown effect, which makes **Trarthan Scarab of Surprising Alliances** — Wild Rogue Exiles have a 50% chance to be accompanied by a Wild Mercenary — the obvious third scarab for a unique-focused build. There is a concrete reason this variant exists in 3.29. The patch notes moved six uniques **out of the core drop pool** and back to mercenary encounters only: **Azadi Crest**, **Binds of Bloody Vengeance**, **The Ghastly Theatre**, **Hand of Heresy**, **Howlcrack** and **Scornflux**. If you want any of those, mercenaries are now the only source. Trarthan gems went the same way — they are no longer possible rewards from Heist Gem Chests and are once again obtained from mercenary encounters. ## Mercenary tiers, classes and the "best mercenary" question Two different things get called "tiers" here, so it is worth separating them. **Support gem tiers.** Mercenaries have their own class of support gems whose strength is measured in tiers, including Gilded supports that players cannot use. A mercenary in a map rolls skills with support counts of None (0), Low (1–2), Medium (2–3) or High (3–5) depending on the skill. Infamous mercenaries have a greater chance of extra supports, and 3.29.1 gave mercenaries slightly more supports on average in maps. More supports means a harder fight, which on a rush strategy is a cost, not a benefit. **Map tiers.** Covered above: roughly twice as many Infamous mercenaries at tier 16 as at tier 1 since 3.29.1. As for **the best mercenary in 3.29** — neither the video nor the wiki ranks them. What the wiki does document is that mercenaries come in attribute-aligned classes and in four noble houses descended from the death-trade families of Trarthus, and that the Atlas tree lets you bias which you meet: **Azadi Supremacy**, **Cyaxan Supremacy** and **Keitan Supremacy** each give 100% increased chance for mercenaries to be from that house, while **Absent Warriors**, **Skills Shortage** and **Education Cuts** give 75% less chance of Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence aligned mercenaries respectively. If a particular class is killing you, those exclusion nodes are the answer.